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Cult of the Living Masters: Alejandro Jodorowsky

Alejandro Jodorowsky was born in 1929 in a
small town in Tocopilla, Chile, to a family of Jewish immigrants who travelled from
Ukraine. After studying at the University of Santiago, he moved to Paris where
he studied mime with Marcel Marceau and formed the surrealist movement Panic with the artists Roland Topor and
Fernando Arrabal. This is the starting point of his first feature film “Fando y
Lis”, produced and banned in Mexico due to its profane content. This, however,
didn’t stop him from continuing to exhibit his surrealistic vein with the
mystical western “El Topo”. Purchased for distribution in the USA, it would
become the first midnight screening ever, a solution found by New York
distributors to screen such an alternative film. With the help of a big fan,
John Lennon, he got funding for “The Holy Mountain” and began adapting Frank
Herbert’s novel “Dune”. This was such a majestic project that no one in
Hollywood dared to produce it. It was around that time that he turned to comic
books, initiating a long-lasting relationship with the graphic artist Moebius.
He did not give up on cinema, but, of the three following films, only “Santa
Sangre” has the surrealistic features that characterized his filmmaking. More
recently, the success of the documentary “Jodorowsky’s Dune”, which recounts
the incidents of this abandoned project, allowed him to return to the big
screen with the autobiographical films “The Dance of Reality” (premiered at MOTELX
2014) and “Endless Poetry”.